On Thursday I paid a winter visit to the gardens at East Ruston Old Vicarage:
I had been waiting for reasonable weather and the forecast looked OK – just high cloud for most of the day. But it turned out to be quite dull and overcast as you can see from the above photograph. However I did manage to get some reasonable photos showing this garden in its winter state.
One technique that I was trying was that of panorama photography. To enable the best images, I need a panoramic head for my tripod (I am planning to build one) but for this visit I was using a temporary set-up – not perfect but mostly adequate.
The above panorama shows the ‘King’s Walk’ from the vicarage. This turned out better than I expected although there was one stitching issue where one part of the image did not properly match the adjacent part. Using some of the manual controls enabled me to reduce, but not eliminate, the issue. I think the problem was caused by not having my camera properly aligned for panorama shooting.
When taking the photos for the above panorama, I took further shots so that I could see what a 180° view would turn out like:
This turned out surprisingly well. In the original images you can see the detail in the distance through the arches: the ‘Paper Lady’ sculpture about 150 meters away on the right and the greenhouse at a similar distance on the left.
There is a new walled garden that opened last year; the plan is in the shape of a brilliant cut diamond (it is, after all, the ‘Diamond Jubilee Walled Garden’). For this I placed myself at the opening at the ‘tip’ of the diamond and got the following:
Although the perspective is correct, this does look rather cramped: it is a visual effect caused by the walls. For the summer shots I may stretch it sideways to give a more natural look. When this garden is in full bloom in the summer, I am going to give a 360° view from the centre a try – it should be stunning.
Not all the panoramas worked though. This one did not stitch properly. I suspect one of the main causes was the lighting is slightly different between the images which confused the stitching software:
You can see higher resolution views in the panorama gallery.